Tag: FOSS

Technology is never just a tool

Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.

The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.

The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.

So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.

But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.

The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.

The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.

The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.

The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.

The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”

The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.

The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.

The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.

From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.

But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.

The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.

Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.

The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.

The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.

If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #indymediaback

The Rainbow Lesson: Building Commons Beyond the Market

One of the things missing from conversations about rebuilding radical networks is that we defult to looking first at the technology. The #OMN question is different – What are the social systems that allow alternatives to survive?

A useful example comes from the history of the Rainbow Gatherings. To an outsider, the strangest thing about a Rainbow Gathering is likely the hippies, the second is the absence of money. Thousands of people gather in forests, share food, organise care, create culture and then disappear again – without tickets, vendors or commercial stages. This can look like a quirky tradition, but there are lessons – the absence of commerce was never just a rule, it was the point. The idea was simple – If you want to show that another society is possible, you cannot only argue against the existing system, you have to create a working alternative.

The non-commercial path was the message, a living example of a working alternative logic. The early Rainbow organisers came out of the Vietnam War veterans and the antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were asking a question that still matters – How do you challenge a system built around war, competition, consumption and hierarchy? One answer was confrontation, another answer was demonstration. the rainbow path was instead of only fighting the existing culture, was to create a space where different values operate with shared resources, mutual aid, no buying and selling, no central authority. People contributing what they can and receiving what they need.

The Free Store experiments and early free festivals showed this approach in practice. The gathering itself became temporary commons – a place where the normal rules of the market were suspended. The important part was not the camping, not the festival. It is the social infrastructure underneath – Food does not appear magically, care does not happen automatically, conflict does not disappear.

A commons requires trust, participation, shared responsibility, informal governance and a culture of contribution. This is the part missing from technology discussions, people imagine the #openweb as about tools – Protocols – Platforms – Software. But the deeper layer is social, the software only works because communities create meaning around it.

The #OMN connection is that this is the same lesson for radical media networks. #Indymedia was never only a publishing platform, It was a social path, the technology enabled publishing, but the power came from the culture of open participation, collective editing and local autonomy to build shared responsibility.

The failure of this network was not simply technical, like many commons, the challenge was maintaining the social practices that made the technology meaningful. A reboot cannot just recreate the tools, it has to regrow the conditions that allowed the tools to matter in a world beyond the market logic.

  • The #dotcons path blindly pushes – create a product, grow users, extract value, centralise control.
  • The commons model works differently – create relationships, grow trust, share value to distribute power.

This does not mean money disappears from the world. The Rainbow example itself shows this complexity. People still need resources. Food still has to be bought somewhere. The outside economy still exists. The difference is where the organising principle sits. Does money organise the community? Or does the community organise resources?

That is the question that matters, it’s the danger of rebuilding the same common sense system – that many alternative paths fail because they challenge the surface while reproducing the structure underneath. A shiny platform can still become a gatekeeper, a new network can still become centralised. A new media system can still become extractive. The question is not only “Is the technology open?” The question is also “Is the culture open?”

The Rainbow Gatherings survived because they were not trying to build a better marketplace. They were trying to practice another way of organising, that is the deeper #openweb lesson. We do not just need alternative tools, we need alternative relationships with tools. It is about creating spaces where people can trust, participate, maintain and build together.

The #OMN vision is not a replacement platform, it is a garden, the technology is the soil, the people are the gardeners, the commons are what grows.

#indymediaback #4opens #openweb #FOSS

Beyond AI

The biggest question is not whether #AI becomes useful. It is who shapes the surrounding paths? A future controlled by a few #dotcons will reproduce the same mess we have now of centralisation, extraction, enclosure. Were a future built through #4opens paths would look different.

The #geekproblem is believing the next tool solves the old problem. But many problems are not tool problems, they are relationship problems. The next stage is not replacing humans with smarter machines, it is building better human paths that can use machines without becoming dependent on them. Beyond AI is about making communities capable, the real upgrade is not artificial intelligence, it is collective intelligence.

AI is changing the scale of content creation, but not raising the quality. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier to producing average books, apps, music, legal documents, academic papers and endless streams of text. The result is a massive increase in output, but what happens when production grows faster than our ability to filter, discuss, trust, maintain and give meaning to what is produced?

More books, but more noise, more apps, but more clutter, more papers, but more pressure on systems of review, more music, but a harder struggle to recognise human creativity and care. The #dotcons logic says – more content = more value – were the #openweb lesson is different, value comes from communities, trust, context and care. The challenge is not creating more things, the challenge is building better commons around the things we create.

The AI question is bigger than the technology, as the current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented by our #fashionistas and there servants as inevitable. The message is everywhere to adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is never neutral, every tool carries assumptions about who benefits, who controls it, what values it embeds and what damage is accepted as the “price of progress”.

From an #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “Can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The real question is “What kind of society does this technology build?” Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? This is the wider #openweb question we should be focusing on.

Large language models (#LLM) and generative AI systems represent a real technical development. They can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are useful capabilities, but the hype jumps from assistance to much larger claims – That AI will replace expertise – That it will solve social problems – That it will transform education and science – That it will create a better future automatically.

The problem is that current AI systems do not understand the world, they generate patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability. A convincing answer is not the same thing as understanding.

The missing social layer in our narrow conversations is that the #openweb was built around a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, from communities, discussion, correction, disagreement and shared responsibility. This is where the #geekproblem appears – the tendency to confuse technical capability with social wisdom – the technical question becomes “Can we build it?” the social question “Should we?” often disappears.

A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the culture around the technology, as technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power.

This is not even touching on that the ecological cost of scale is a catastrophe in the era of #climatechaos and social backdown. The current AI boom depends on enormous infrastructure, huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware with constant replacement cycles leading to the large-scale resource extraction. At a time of #climatechaos, we should question whether endless expansion is the only possible future. The #dotcons model has always worked through scale, more users, more data, more infrastructure and more dependency. Generative AI is arriving inside the same economic system that created the catastrophic problems it claims to solve.

Then we have the open internet problem, the #openweb was built around participation, people created #4opens websites, communities, documentation, software and culture. GenAI introduces a different path, that the internet becomes raw material, this human creativity becomes training data. Communities produce knowledge, while large companies extract and monetise it. This creates a dangerous cycle were there is less support for creators → less motivation to create → less genuine knowledge → more dependence on generated content. Its #KISS to understand that healthy commons cannot survive if everything is extracted and nothing is returned.

The #Fediverse and the question of growth, a few years ago there was a feeling that the #Fediverse development culture was running on leftovers. Social movements arrived in waves, and many feared that more waves was moving into #mainstreaming. Since then, the Fediverse has grown, with more people knowing about decentralised social media, more organisations paying attention. Ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to wider adoption.

But growth always creates a question – What happens when a movement becomes successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing it? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions – People have agency – Communities shape their own spaces – Experimentation matters more than optimisation – Trust matters more than control and Commons matter more than platforms. #Mainstreaming brings pressures, these are not automatically bad. But there is a danger that the technology scales while the culture that created it gets diluted. Federation is a technical idea. Living commons is a social one, the challenge remains – now do we grow without losing the roots?

The narrow lesson from #FOSS – it is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure and no Fediverse ecosystem as we know it. It has created extraordinary shared value, but success should not stop us asking difficult questions. The question is not whether FOSS works, the question is – Who does it work for? Where does it struggle? What social lessons can we learn? One recurring problem is the idea that open source is simply a marketplace of independent individuals.

When building the future we actually want – The question is not whether we use AI, more It’s whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The future depends on whether tools strengthen human networks or replace them. Whether they support commons or enclosure, whether they increase agency or dependency.

But what we are seeing is that the tools we need most are often the first things stressed, messy and elitist systems try to defund, discredit and dismantle. Why? Because they require uncertainty, require questioning assumptions, require admitting complexity. Those are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.

Keep this in mind on native #openweb paths.

Why WhatsApp plebiscites, and #dotcons in general are a crude and negative democratic instrument

A plebiscite (or simple poll) reduces complex questions to binary or multiple-choice outcomes decided by raw headcount. This works reasonably well for large nation-states were aggregating millions of preferences is practically necessary. But in small community groups – like a WhatsApp boating community – it undermines democratic values rather than express them, for several reasons.

The participation fallacy – Whoever happens to be on their phone when the poll appears votes; everyone else is excluded by timing. In a WhatsApp group, this might mean a dozen people determine policy for two hundred. The result carries the appearance of collective legitimacy while actually reflecting a self-selected subset. True democratic representation requires deliberate, structured participation – not whoever checks notifications first.

Suppression of minority interests – This is perhaps the deepest problem. A poll asking “should we allow X at the mooring?” can produce a 60/40 result that completely ignores why the 40% disagree. In a functioning community democracy, minority positions deserve to be heard, reasoned with, and sometimes protected. A simple poll flattens all of that. The liveaboard who depends on a particular mooring has the same one vote as the weekend visitor who barely uses it.

The tyranny of the majority in microcosm – John Stuart Mill’s classic concern about majoritarian democracy – that it can become a form of collective tyranny over individuals – is almost more acute in small groups than in states. In a national election, your minority view is still represented through opposition parties, courts, constitutions. In a WhatsApp poll, you simply lose, with no appeal mechanism, no minority rights protection, and often no transparency about who voted or why.

Social pressure distorts the vote – In a small group, people know each other. Polls are rarely secret. Vocal members who post before the poll closes visibly shift the outcome. Quieter members – often those with the most legitimate concerns – may not vote at all to avoid conflict. The result reflects social dominance as much as genuine preference. A WhatsApp poll in a group like that might ask something like “should we organise a group clean-up on Saturday?” which seems harmless – but even this excludes people who work weekends, who have caring responsibilities, who are moored further out and can’t get there. A poll that produces “yes, 23 votes to 4” then generates social pressure to participate that bears down hardest on the most vulnerable members.

For contentious issues a WhatsApp poll is the worst possible instrument, as itt short-circuits exactly the conversation and negotiation that would surface the real interests at stake. What works better in community groups is face to face or federated trust based deliberative democracy rather than plebiscitary voting. Distinguishing between decisions that affect everyone equally and decisions that affect specific individuals far more than others – the latter should require consent, not just majority approval.

The irony is that small community groups like boating communities are ideal for genuine deliberative democracy – people know each other, stakes are concrete, conversations are possible. WhatsApp polls squander that by importing the bluntest majoritarian tool into a context that could support something richer.

Fluffy mess makeing

A second problem with #dotcons digital community decision-making is the hidden layer underneath the visible conversation: metadata is when organising becomes evidence in court cases.

People think privacy as the content of messages – what someone wrote, what someone posted, what opinion they expressed. But modern platforms collect something much broader: who joined a group, who attended an event, who reacted to a post, who communicated with whom, when people were active, who organised conversations, who supported a campaign, the patterns of relationships and activity.

This information will reveal the structure of a community even without reading the actual conversations. A WhatsApp group, Facebook group, or online community is a map of social relationships. That matters because grassroots organising often happens through relationships. The same online networks that allow communities to defend their rights, challenge poor decisions, or hold powerful actors accountable can also become visible records of who is involved.

The danger appears when, activism turns spiky and there is a conflict between less powerful groups and privileged actors. A campaign group, activist network, neighbourhood organisation, or community project might simply be trying to protect a shared space or challenge unfair treatment. But the digital traces created while organising can later be used against those people.

This does not require some dramatic conspiracy, it happens through ordinary legal processes. A court order can require a platform to provide information relevant to a legal case. Large platforms hold enormous amounts of stored data, and when authorities or private actors successfully obtain legal access, information that people assumed was just part of a conversation can become evidence.

The issue with this is imbalance, a large corporation, wealthy individual, or powerful institution have far more ability to navigate legal systems than a small grassroots group. They have lawyers, resources, and institutional support. Community activists have only their networks and their ability to organise.

This creates a contradiction, the “common sense” digital tools that allow ordinary people to coordinate can also create permanent records of that coordination. The answer is partial – there are #FOSS and #NGO tools that make this less of a problem – Healthy commons needs people to be able to organise, disagree, challenge power, and build alternatives without automatically creating a legal danger to everyone involved.

The question is not whether communities should be accountable, the question is: accountable to whom, and who has the power to use the information? Because in struggles between grassroots groups and privileged actors, metadata can become another form of power.

The lesson is simple – Build open movements, but do not naively confuse openness with exposure. Commons needs trust, but they don’t need to leave a #dotcons surveillance trail. Yes people will use bad tools anyway, but it’s good if some people use better tools to start stepping away from this digital and social mess.

Some first #KISS step tools

  • Use the #openweb as core organising, do not use the #dotcons – an example here is open collective website not WhatsApp chat or Google Docs. Tools shape behaver and metadata gets people prosecuted.
  • Use #signal for chat, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s better than the rest, use a common platform.
  • Use #torbrowser for web searches and browsing of any sensitive subject, if you want to use AI, Then don’t logged-in inside tor for any sensitive questions. All AI questions are stored as a part of your account and can be used agonist you – this is true even when you are not logged in.
  • Do not rely on #AI for activist research or grassroots legal thinking – its hallucinations and training data will endanger you. The AI default is always wrong on this path without inside knowledge to prompt past the #mainstreaming output.

I’ve come to think that caring for people requires a degree of resistance to the culture around us. Not because people are bad, but because so much of the dominant culture is built around values that put profit, status, and competition ahead of human need. In that sense, care becomes a quiet act of rebellion.

#openweb #mutualaid #care #solidarity #deathcult #climatechaos #Oxfordboaters

People destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession

When Technologists Forget the Warning

The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.

Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.

A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.

But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.

The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.

The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.

A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.

The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.

Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.

The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”

It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”

The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.

The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.

Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding

Building beyond the #deathcult – Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path:

  • venture capital growth
  • platform monopolies
  • extraction of attention and data
  • endless scaling
  • short-term metrics
  • private ownership of public infrastructure

This has produced #techshit – technology built because it can make money, not because it improves society. And now we are facing an era of #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, and social instability. The question we have to ask is uncomfortable – Has our current model of technology funding become part of the problem?

The answer cannot simply be “more innovation”, we have had decades of innovation. The problem is that innovation has been pointed in the wrong direction. The #openweb and #FOSS communities contain many of the seeds of a different path, but we still fall into the same trap of building tools to optimise code, solve technical problems, but we struggle with the social question of how do we build and sustain commons?

This is the #geekproblem, not that technical people are bad, not that code does not matter. But that we treat social systems as if they are just technical systems waiting to be fixed. They are not: A community is not a server, a movement is not a repository, a network is not just infrastructure. The missing piece is grassroots funding models that support the social work around technology.

What could grassroots tech funding look like? Instead of asking “How can we create the next unicorn?” Ask “How do we support useful things that communities actually need?” This means funding – Maintenance, not just invention as a huge amount of valuable #FOSS work is boring. Keeping things running, helping users, writing documentation and supporting communities to do governance. This is invisible labour, but it is what keeps the commons alive.

We need networks, not just products, the #dotcons model asks “What is the product?” The #openweb question should be “What relationships are we strengthening?” On this native path, funding needs to support ecosystems, not just individual projects. Long-term contribution, not short-term growth.

A grassroots project does not need to become a company, it might need small sustainable funding, shared infrastructure, community support, public accountability with open processes. Growth is not always success, sometimes resilience is success. Funding the gaps between technology and society – The hardest work is often translation by helping activists use tools, developers understand communities, so communities can shape technology.

This is where #OMN sits, not just making software, but more importantly building the social infrastructure around software. The hardest problem is cultural, the block is not only money. The block is “common sense”, living inside a #neoliberal idea where something is only useful if it produces financial return. Anything outside that looks interesting but “unrealistic”.

The #deathcult assumption is if it cannot become a profitable business, it has no value. But the internet itself was not built this way, the #openweb grew from public investment, shared knowledge, volunteer contribution, and communities building things because they mattered. We need to recover that thinking, but to breaking out of the cycle is difficult because it requires changing what we measure.

Not, how much money did this make? But how much capacity did this create? How many people can now participate? How much commons did we grow and how much power moved away from concentrated systems?

The challenge for #OMN, #OGB, #4opens and #indymediaback is not only technical. It is creating a different economic imagination, a way of funding technology that helps communities grow instead of helping platforms extract.

The future will not be built only by companies, it will be built by people creating alternatives together.

To make this path work we need a hand reaching back across the gap – Stepping away from the #dotcons is not a simple a moral judgment to jump from one world to another. A native path is one foot in, one foot out. To stay connected enough to understand where people are, what they need, and how they think – while building alternatives that move beyond the worship of the #deathcult.

The hand reaches back across the gap, not to pull people into the past, but to help people cross into something different, change does not happen by shouting from the other side. It happens by building bridges while growing the new.

So the question is: why are so many people not acting? In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in society and technology are not just slowing things down, they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.

The question is not only what is wrong, more what are we building instead? Different paths already exist with the #4opens, #penweb, #OGB, #indymediaback and wider #OMN projects. These are paths to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.

There is no profit in this for us, we are not building this to cash out. So maybe the more useful question is not “What’s the agenda?” Maybe ask – Who benefits when alternatives never get built People often look for who gains from creating something. But power also exists in maintaining the status quo.

The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives – spaces based on sharing, participation, and collective ownership. That threatens systems built on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.

The challenge is mediation, how do we separate signal from noise? How do we build alternatives while people are still trapped inside the old systems? How do we create spaces where change can actually happen?

One foot in – One foot out – A hand across the gap.

Don’t become part of the blockage, help build the bridge.

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.

What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.

Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.

This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.

Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”

Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.

Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.

The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.

The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.

The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.

The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.

The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.

The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.

In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.

The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.

What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:

  • healthcare,
  • housing,
  • education,
  • water,
  • transport,
  • welfare,
  • culture,
  • democratic infrastructure.

These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:

“There is no such thing as society.”

This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:

  • trust,
  • reciprocity,
  • accountability,
  • long-term stewardship,
  • community responsibility.

When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.

Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.

The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.

Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.

Women taking about oppressors

With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.

The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.

The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.

And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.

Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.

The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.

The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.

What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.

The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.

#OMN #Neoliberalism #Thatcher #Reagan #OpenWeb #4opens #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #ClimateChaos #Mainstreaming #Deathcult #Dotcons #BuildingAlternatives

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

#openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

#opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

#makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

#indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

#grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

#feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

#fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

#encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

#dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

#climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

The #OMN Framework: The Five Functions (#5F)

The #OMN is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. People shape the flow, you can find a more technical view to read after here. A human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on #FOSS practices and the #4opens:

  • open data
  • open source
  • open process
  • open standards

It doesn’t start with features, apps, or ideology, it starts with flows. Imagine the network as:

pipes and holding tanks

Content (objects) flows through them, communities decide how that flow is shaped. Nothing magical, nothing hidden. This matters because:

If people can’t picture how a system works, they can’t govern it.
And when systems become opaque, power centralises.

So #OMN reduces everything to five simple functions:

1. Publish

(Add a drop to the flow)

Publishing is simply adding an object:

  • a story
  • a post
  • media
  • data

to a stream.

  • No automatic amplification
  • No built-in authority
  • No algorithmic boost

Publication is contribution, not domination.

2. Subscribe

(Connect the pipes)

Subscription is how flows connect:

  • people
  • groups
  • topics
  • instances

This replaces:

  • platform logic → “you are inside us”
    with
  • network logic → “this connects to that”

No opaque ranking, you decide which pipes you connect.

3. Moderate

(Filter and route the flow)

Moderation is not censorship. It’s sieving.

Flows can:

  • pass through
  • be filtered
  • be slowed or prioritised
  • be contextualised

Trust is:

  • local
  • visible
  • reversible

Different communities can apply different filters to the same flow.

This is a feature, not a bug.

4. Rollback

(Drain and reset the flow)

Rollback is how systems recover:

  • remove past content from your stream
  • undo aggregation decisions
  • correct mistakes
  • respond to abuse

Without rollback:

  • errors become power struggles

With rollback:

Accountability becomes procedural, not punitive.

5. Edit Metadata

(Shape meaning downstream)

Content is not rewritten – it is contextualised.

Metadata can include:

  • tags
  • summaries
  • trust signals
  • warnings
  • translations
  • relationships

This is where meaning is created.

Not by algorithms, but by people.

The Holding Tank

Underneath it all is:

a simple storage layer

  • a database
  • stored objects
  • moving through flows

No “AI brain” or hidden feed logic, just data shaped by social processes.

Why This Matters

Most current systems bundle everything together:

  • identity
  • publishing
  • distribution
  • moderation
  • monetisation

This creates centralised control, even when systems claim to be “open”.

OMN does the opposite:

It separates the core functions.

This makes the system:

  • understandable
  • auditable
  • forkable
  • governable

#NothingNew by Design

This model isn’t new, it mirrors systems we already understand:

  • plumbing
  • electrical grids
  • packet-switched networks
  • version control

That’s intentional.

Systems people understand are systems people can govern.

From Platforms to Commons

The #5F is the smallest possible set of actions needed to run a media network:

  • Publish
  • Subscribe
  • Moderate
  • Rollback
  • Edit

Everything else:

  • feeds
  • timelines
  • notifications
  • UI/UX

…is just interface, nice to have but not essential.

The Point Is – The OMN is not about building a better platform.

It’s about building:

infrastructure for a democratic digital commons

Simple flows.
Social mediation.
Human control.

Not control systems, but trust systems.

In One Line

#OMN is plumbing for the #openweb. #KISS

To simplify the Open Media Network (#OMN), we focus on its core goal: creating a human-scale, community-governed media infrastructure that isn’t controlled by big corporate platforms. As we outline to understand and “simplify” the #OMN is a simple workflow:

  • Write: Creating the content.
  • Tag: Categorizing it, so others can find it.
  • Publish: Making it available on the web.
  • Federate: Sharing it across different trusted networks.
  • Archive: Ensuring it remains accessible over time.

The “#4opens” Framework is built on four principles designed to keep power in the hands of communities and users rather than central authorities:

  • Open Data: Information belongs to the community.
  • Open Source: The code is free to see and change.
  • Open Process: Decisions are made transparently.
  • Open Standards: Systems can “talk” to each other without gatekeepers.

Key Concepts for Simplification

  • Keep It Simple (KISS): The system should be so simple that anyone can mentally model how it works. If it’s too complex to understand, it’s too complex to govern.
  • Social over Technical: Prioritise how people use the tools over how “elegant” the code is, to mediate the #geekproblem (tech that’s too hard for normal people to use).
  • Composting the Past: Instead of starting from scratch or repeating old mistakes, the #OMN is about taking the “wreckage” of previous projects and turning them into “fertile soil” for new, federated networks.
  • Trust-Based Networking: It moves away from global algorithms and toward small, connected “nodes” of people who trust each other (or not).

You can build any application from this foundation – that’s the point of keeping the core this simple. On top of the basic #OMN #5F, we’re developing a set of seed projects:

  • #makinghistory – tools to keep grassroots and mainstream history alive, linked, and evolving across the #openweb
  • #indymediaback – a reboot of grassroots news, open publishing with modern federated infrastructure
  • #OGB (Open Governance Body) – lightweight, federated governance for coordinating people, decisions, and trust
  • #digitaldetox – a horizontal tool to step away from addictive, manipulative platform dynamics

Interoperability is default, not an afterthought, nothing is locked in, instead of building another isolated platform, we plug into the existing ecosystem, extend it to compost what doesn’t work. This is how we grow the #openweb by building better flows inside what already exists, not by replacing everything.

These aren’t separate silos, they’re expressions of the same underlying flows. The system is native to the Fediverse, built on ActivityPub. That means content flows in from existing platforms and codebases and flows out to existing networks and apps.

Compost metaphor – is memorable, not just technical. The focus on process over platform is clear and important. The move to simple steps works as onboarding and the insistence on #KISS + #nothingnew is the right first step.

#OMN is not an app, it’s a process + tools to move from isolation to commons.

The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

At #NOAW event I talked a lot about the digital commons so thought it might be useful to write a post grounding this. The digital commons are not a future vision, it’s something we already have. At its simplest, the digital commons are the widely used #4opens digital resources of software, knowledge, data, and culture created collectively, governed by communities, and made available for public (re)use. This is the native path of the #openweb it’s been around for a long time, it might be hard to see but just about all of our current #dotcons mess is built on top of this layer.

There is a long history of commons in wider society. But mostly today we focus on the licences that protect reuse and sharing. None of this is abstract theory, it’s making the practical, working infrastructure that underpins much of what people still find useful online. One of the roots of the current digital commons go back to the 1980s and the emergence of the free software movement, led by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. This was not just about code, it was a social and political project:

  • Software should be shared
  • Users should have control
  • Improvements should remain in the commons

The creation of the GNU General Public Licence was the first step, enforcing a simple rule that if you benefit from the commons, you give back to the commons. The commons isn’t one thing, it’s an ecosystem – Some #KISS examples include:

  • Wikis – collectively written and maintained knowledge (#Wikipedia)
  • Open source software – built in public, shared freely (#FOSS)
  • Public code repositories like GitHub used to be (name one)
  • Open licensing systems like Creative Commons
  • Federated social tools built on ActivityPub (#Mastodon)

The Path is governance by the people who use it. What makes the digital commons different from “just free stuff” is this the people building it can shape how it works, a key distinction it’s not just access – it’s agency. The commons are non-exclusive (available to others), oriented toward use and reuse and governed by its participants, this is why it matters politically.

Today, much of the internet still runs on the digital commons, but the visible layer is dominated by #dotcons platforms. This creates a split of Commons layers → open, slow, sustainable and Platform layers → closed, extractive, growth-driven. People still rely on the commons, but interact through closed systems, this contradiction is unstable.

Policy is our current-missed opportunity, as our institutions see only the surface value. The European Union’s European Commission has pushed open source strategies as part of digital sovereignty, particularly through programmes like Horizon Europe. The idea is native – Share code – Collaborate openly – Build public infrastructure. But in practice, most of this gets lost in #NGO process, bureaucracy, and capture. The money flows, but the commons don’t grow.

The “Tragedy” of the Digital Commons. Like any commons, in the mess we live in today commons can be degraded from overuse (infrastructure strain), pollution (spam, low-quality content, noise) and information overload. The result is a corrupted signal-to-noise ratio, it is a real issue – but it’s to often used as an excuse to centralise control. This is largely solved by horizontal vs virtical scaling, if people can take this real native path.

There are social gaps. The commons reflects the culture that builds it, yes gender imbalance persists, access is uneven, and geek culture is too often exclusionary (#geekproblem). But the bigger problem we face is capture and drift. We’ve already seen it happen once: Free software → “open source” (politics stripped out). Commons → #dotcons platform capture.

Now we see this happening in the #Fediverse and #openweb reboot spaces with the last few years of vertical agendas dominating to meany outreach spaces, #NGO mediation and thus diluten is pushing native grassroots agency out, this is an old cycle repeating – the cycle that we need to compost.

OK, despite all the #mainstreaming mess, the digital commons are still the most viable path we have, we need to see this path not as hypothetical – more as it just works, but is underresourced. From a #OMN perspective, the digital commons are not only infrastructure, it’s the soil. You don’t build movements on platforms, you grow them in commons, but this growth needs care:

  • Protection from capture
  • Active governance
  • Social grounding, not just technical process

And most importantly the commons only survives if people act as commoners. The challenge now isn’t only to explain the digital commons, it’s to defend, rebuild, and extend it. That means funding native projects, keeping governance in the hands of participants to bridge activism, development, and real-world use as a path to push back against the continuing #mainstreaming capture.

This is not about nostalgia, it’s about #KISS recognising that we already have the tools we need, then caring enough not to only exploit them. Please try and be better than the current #mainstreaming on this, thanks.

Proposal – from #NOAW

Proposal – from #NOAW

This is the open-source – split – FOSS moment for the Fediverse. We’ve seen this before. When “open source” was carved out of Free Software politics, it made the space more business-friendly – but at a cost, the movement never fully recovered from this. The result was a long-term weakening of the social and political grounding that made FOSS meaningful in the first place. We are in real danger of repeating this pattern in the Fediverse.

Vertical agendas – loud, well-funded, and institutionally backed – dominate conversations and displace the native horizontalism that defines the Fediverse and the #openweb. These agendas will ultimately fail, but not before they push out the grassroots energy that actually makes things work.

A Practical Intervention

One leverage point is funding – specifically, how funding is framed, distributed, and justified within the #mainstreaming process.

So the question is: how do we intervene effectively? It’s a simple classic path: mess – opening – implement.

Create an EU-Focused Consortium

Build a working consortium with three balanced pillars:

* Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change

* #NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures

* Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code

The goal is simple, to deliver real, native #openweb tools that create meaningful social change, not just online, but in the wider world.

Strategy

1. Discredit the Current Waste

Document and publicize the massive misallocation of public funds:

* Hundreds of millions wasted on blockchain projects

* The same pattern now repeating with AI funding

This isn’t just critique, it’s strategic pressure. It weakens the legitimacy of the current funding agenda.

2. Open a Gap

By exposing this waste, you temporarily sideline parts of the “blocking class”, those who dominate but do not deliver. This creates a window of opportunity.

3. Seed the Commons

Use that opening to:

* Channel small, strategic funding (“cents on the euro”) into multiple grassroots projects

* Fund at least three parallel codebases per call.

* Expect two to be captured or fail

* Ensure one remains viable and native

Because these projects are built on ActivityPub, even “failed” or captured projects can still interoperate within the Fediverse ecosystem and thus can maybe grow to become meaningful. Diversity is good.

Outcome

This approach nudges EU technology policy – maybe programs like Horizon Europe – toward:

* Practical, working tools, native research. Based on meany “#Nlnet” like federated working paths.

* Federated, interoperable systems

* Socially grounded infrastructure

#OMN Fit

The #OMN already has four native commons projects that align directly with this strategy:

* Governance

* Media

* Historical memory

* Digital addiction

These are not abstract ideas, they are ready-to-grow seeds for a healthier #openweb ecosystem.

Feel free to add to this in the comments I will update the text with feedback.

UPDATE: for me the failer mode of this is the 3 groups won’t be able to stay together: Activism – holding the political line and pushing for real change. NGO layer – interfacing with bureaucracy and policy structures. Grassroots #FOSS builders – creating and maintaining commons-based code.

It’s the snip problem, people will cut off pieces of the whole for there short term survival or career building, the coalition will splinter, and then fail. I think the above strategy is good apart from this hole – how do we fill or at least mediate this?

A Note on “Security” for the #FOSS Crew

We need to have a clearer, more grounded conversation about “security” and what it actually means in the context of the #openweb. There is a long history of thinking in #FOSS spaces that security is something we can solve purely technically: better encryption, better protocols, better architectures. But in everyday life and practice, people need to work from a much simpler starting point – We do not trust client–server security. We only meaningfully trust what can be verified through the #4opens. And even with #p2p, we keep our trust closed limited.

Why? Because the underlying systems people actually use are insecure by design: old phones, opaque operating systems, proprietary blobs built and controlled by #dotcons. You can build the most secure system in the world, but if the people you are communicating with are using compromised devices, then your security collapses to their level.

That’s the bit people who fixate on closed don’t like to face. So a #KISS approach helps cut through the illusion – At normal use, there is very little real security. At paranoid levels, security breaks down socially, because you still need to interact with people operating at the normal level. That doesn’t mean security doesn’t matter. It means we need to stop pretending it technically works in isolation from social reality.

Why closed paths, spaces and projects fail socially, is a harder point. Closed systems are often justified in the name of security, privacy, or control, but socially, they create a very different dynamic in that they remove visibility. And without visibility, you cannot form shared judgment, without shared judgment, you cannot have social truth. In closed environments, bad actors – call them “monsters” if you like – can manipulate, divide, coordinate in the dark to avoid accountability, because there is no wider context to test what is happening.

In open systems, the same actors exist, but they are much easier to see, challenge, and trip up, because conversations are visible, processes are transparent and history is accessible. Closed breeds monsters, open pushes them out of the light and into the shadows. This is why, for the #openweb, “closed” should be deliberately limited and clearly bounded, not expanded as a default.

There is a very real social problem on this with #Encryptionism, as a social project as it is where meany parts of the #FOSS world go wrong. There is a strong tendency – what we call the #encryptionists – to treat encryption as a kind of universal solution, were in reality, this to often becomes: a focus on abstract technical purity, a dismissal of messy social reality to retreat into systems that don’t scale socially. And too often, aligns – ironically – with the same #deathcult logic it claims to resist: control, fear, and abstraction over lived practice. Encryption is a tool, not a culture.

This brings up the #Geekproblem – put simply – The people building the tools often cannot see the social problems those tools create. Even when those problems are pointed out repeatedly, over years, with real-world examples, the response is often negative and #blocking – to retreat into technical framing, to rephrase the issue in jargon, to build another “better” tool that misses the point.

A useful way to explain this to the #FOSS crew is yes, jargon can be messy, but this is not just about language. The deeper issue is cultural blindness, lets look at a concrete example that might help in bridging: #Indymedia was a ten-year working global experiment in open publishing and #4opens practice. And, yes, it ran into exactly these tensions, in the UK, the project fractured along three lines:

  • #Encryptionists – blocking aggregation due to abstract security concerns
  • #Fashernistas – pushing shiny but incompatible “better” solutions
  • #Openweb practitioners – arguing for simple, interoperable approaches (like #RSS)

Instead of adopting existing standards like RSS, parts of the project built new, incompatible formats, “better” on paper, but useless in practice. The result? Fragmentation, internal conflict, loss of interoperability, eventual collapse. All three sides lost. This pattern should feel familiar, you can still see it today in parts of the Fediverse.

The practical path forward, starts with taking this history seriously, then a few things become clear, that closed should be minimal and purposeful, not the default. Open processes (#4opens) are the only scalable form of trust, interoperability beats cleverness, social reality matters more than technical purity. And most importantly we need to design for the world as it is, not the world we only wish existed.

One Foot In, One Foot Out. Right now, most people are still inside the #dotcons. So the path forward isn’t purity, it’s transition. The approach we are taking with #OMN, it is simple, install and configure usable #openweb tools, make them accessible, let people use them alongside existing platforms to support a gradual #walkaway culture. One foot in. One foot out. If enough people take that step, the balance shifts.

But to take this step we need to compost the closed, we don’t need to destroy everything that exists, we need to compost it. Take what works, turn over what doesn’t, to grow something better from the remains. That means being honest about the limits of security, about the dangers of closed systems and about the cultural blind spots in #FOSS. If we can do that, we have a chance to build an #openweb that actually works.

If we can’t, we will keep repeating the same failures – just with better code.